Poetry Magazines - Life after Plath: Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes Life after Plath: Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes Mick Delap talks to Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of The Times What can I tell you that you do not know Of the life after death? That is the question with which Ted Hughes begins one of the later poems in Birthday Letters. As in nearly all the eighty eight poems in the collection, he’s talking directly to the poet Sylvia Plath, his wife for seven years, before her suicide in February 1963, and the mother of his two children. In Life after Death, he recalls in painful and moving detail how he and the children coped with the immediate aftermath of her death, in a flat in Primrose Hill, near London Zoo, in the frozen weeks of one of the coldest winters of the century. Only to find a strange sort of solace: Dropped from life, We three made a deep silence In our separate cots. We were comforted by wolves. Under that February moon and the moon of March The Zoo had come close. And in spite of the city Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night For minutes on end They sang.

They had found where we lay.... They wound us and enmeshed us In their wailing for you, their mourning for us, They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death, In the fallen snow, under falling snow. Ever since Plath died, Hughes had resolutely kept his own counsel, in the face of often bitter and highly public wrangling about the nature of their life together. Then, after nearly thirty five years of silence on the subject, it was revealed towards the end of January 1998 that Hughes was finally going to speak out, by publishing a hitherto unsuspected collection of poems written over the years since Plath died, about his life with her. The Times, recognising a major literary event, announced a six part serialisation. And over the next week, proceeded to print a representative twelve of the eighty eight “Birthday Letter” poems. The poems had been selected by the Literary Editor of The Times, Erica Wagner, who also provided a running commentary. The columnist “NB” in sister journal, the TLS, rather sourly accused The Times of “treating the whole thing as a soap opera in verse”.

Hughes stayed well out of sight, letting the poems do all the speaking for him. And when Birthday Letters was finally published on 29th January, it became an instant best seller. Six weeks later, Magma’s Mick Delap went to Wapping to ask Erica Wagner about a phenomenon she had helped create. MD: Had you been at all involved in the earlier Plath/Hughes controversies? EW: I had read both their work when I was at school and university, and afterwards. I remember reading Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman when it first appeared in the New Yorker, and of course I had known something of the controversy. But I had always felt it unfortunate that there seemed to be a division into two camps. You were either in the Hughes camp, or the Plath camp. This was something I never liked or wanted to be a part of. MD: Sylvia Plath died in 1963. Ted Hughes has been famously silent, or almost silent, since then about their seven years together. In 1981 we had the very spare introduction that Hughes wrote to Plath’s Collected Poems. There is an implicit acknowledgement there of the fact that they were together when she wrote most of the poems.

But it appears a very flat and a rather cold, academic, document. So why do you think Hughes has now decided to publish this very personal record of their life together? EW: I wouldn’t venture to answer that, because I think only Hughes can answer that. I didn’t have any direct dealings with him when I was preparing the serialisation, and I wouldn’t wish to speak for him. Perhaps even he couldn’t give you a coherent answer. One of the things that comes across most strongly in the book is how deeply felt these poems are; and to explain away feelings like that is rarely possible. MD: The feelings seem to me to range from an immense and continuing grief, through regret, and even into a kind of humour. In The Beach, for instance, when he’s recounting Plath’s outrage at the dowdiness of Britain in 1962, he’s quite wry: …… Every vehicle a hearse. The traffic procession a hushing leftover Of Victoria’s perpetual funeral Sunday - The funeral of colour and life and light! London a morgue of dinge - English dinge. Our sole indigenous art form - depressionist!

But there seems also to be a feeling that he’d failed her, that a different person might have been better for her. One of the poems is called Error - his error, he says, in bringing her to Devon in 1961, to: my dreamland, … my land of totems. He ends Epiphany with the line: But I failed. Our marriage had failed. And in the earlier poem, 9 Willow Street, which was the address of their flat in Boston in 1958, he says: Alone Either of us might have met with a life. Siamese-twinned, each of us festering A unique soul-sepsis for the other, Each of us was the stake impaling the other. EW: Yes. I also sensed anger in a lot of the poems. A rage directed at himself, and at her dead father particularly. MD: And then towards the end, in that second to last poem in the book, The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother, there’s an anger at the critics: …. A kind Bite the face off her gravestone. Gulp down the grave ornaments. Swallow the very soil. EW: Yes. Which I have always felt was a completely understandable anger.

I’m afraid, you know, I think he’s right. I just think he’s right. If only because no one else knows what’s going on in a marriage besides the two people in it. MD: The eighty eight poems in the book are presented in strictly chronological order. They start with Hughes recollecting meeting Plath in 1956, and they go right through into the nineteen nineties. Freedom of Speech, for instance, near the end of the book, starts with the line, At your sixtieth birthday .... which would have been in 1992. So they are presented chronologically. Did you get a sense of how he might have actually written them? EW: No. You know they were written over the past twenty-five years. For poems written over that span of time, they seem to have a remarkable consistency to them. That may be because of their subject matter. Or it may be how they were revised. I don’t know. Hughes has expressed a wish that the book should speak for itself. He’s not wished to speak about the book. He did not give us or anyone else an interview. And I think that was the right decision. MD: The collection is entitled Birthday Letters.

Whose birthday? Is it Sylvia Plath’s birthday? She was born on October 27th, 1932. She died on February 11th 1963. So they were published at a time which was closer to the death than the birthday. EW: I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot of speculation, and I suppose I’ve made my own. I’ve not spoken directly to Hughes about it, but I think it’s a title that reflects her own very well known sequence of poems, Poem for a Birthday. Maybe for Hughes the “Birthday” is a new beginning. That feels right to me. When I glossed the poems for the serialisation in The Times, you want to make reference to specific events. And it’s certainly possible to do that with these poems more than with many poems. However, I don’t think poetry of any kind is something that asks to be decoded. It’s not like a cryptogram. And I think that applies to the title as much as the poems. MD: Do you think it is necessary to know Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and to know the people he’s referring to, to get the most out of Birthday Letters?

Your gloss in The Times was very helpful for many of us. But as you say, Hughes has laid the poems out without a commentary; he obviously expects them to stand or fall by themselves. Do you think that is going to be difficult for readers who are coming to them who don’t know the story they are telling in any great detail? EW: Well, I don’t think there is ever anything wrong if a book requires you to know something else. I think that’s how literature works. Literature reflects its past. Peter Carey recently wrote a novel, Jack Maggs, which draws greatly on, and reflects, Great Expectations. And you’d be the poorer, reading it, if you didn’t know Great Expectations. It may be a peculiarly late twentieth century thing to say, “well, it’s unfair! We have to know too much to read this!” I think that’s actually a good thing. I think anyone’s readings of the poems will be enriched by knowing his earlier work, and hers. It’s striking, just monitoring the relevant book sales.

Not only did Birthday Letters become a best seller, but also there was a great increase in the sales of Plath’s poems, of her novel, The Bell Jar, and of Hughes’ earlier works, like The Hawk in the Rain. So clearly people don’t resent being thrown back. These are the poems Hughes wanted to write. Every reader has to read them in his or her own way. Hughes is not going to provide a gloss, but one can be found. MD: When Hughes decided to publish these poems, he must have known they were going to be picked over not just as a set of poems, but also as the long-awaited comment from him. It seems to me that the comment he is making in Birthday Letters goes something like this: “maybe somebody else could have affected the outcome slightly differently, but when I married Sylvia Plath, she was pointed very firmly in a dangerous direction. I failed her in some ways, and maybe somebody else, some better suited person, would have saved her.” There’s that poem, The Shot, where Hughes is comparing her to a high-velocity bullet: gold-lacketed, solid silver. nickel-tipped.

She’s aiming herself at Hughes; and, hidden behind him, aiming at your real target ... your Daddy, the God with the smoking gun. And Hughes ends the poem: For a long time A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown. So, is Birthday Letters offered in exculpation - as a justification? EW: No, I don’t think so. I suppose partly I don’t think that because I don’t think justification ought to be required. I don’t believe what happened to her legacy was helpful to anybody. It certainly wasn’t helpful to Hughes. I’ve met him once or twice, but I wouldn’t claim to know him. But I can’t imagine that what went on was good for anybody. And he had two small children to raise. I had never seen why he should have been forced to offer a defence, and I don’t think this reads like a defence or like an explanation. I think it reads as an account. I don’t think in a case like this there should be sides. Of course there will always seem to be sides, because people take them. But in the main this book was very warmly received. And I think that showed that there was a fundamental understanding of that.

Once the poems were available, it became apparent what they were, and what perhaps they needed to be. Readers, perhaps, discovered that you read them, and you realise you don’t need a defence; you’re not looking for a defence. And that’s not what they are. MD: How great will we think they are in ten or fifteen years time? EW: I feel at the moment it is very difficult to get away from their overwhelming biographical interest and impact. It’s nearly impossible just to judge them as if you were from Mars. I think they are meant to be read as a sequence. And I think they will always be intertwined with their biographical meaning. But as the dust settles, without question I think these are very powerful, vivid poems. Of course they have their weaknesses as individual poems. I don’t think they’re perfect works. But what is? MD: Do you think publishing this collection is an exorcism for Hughes? Or is it an ongoing conversation with somebody who is still very present? EW: I don’t know. And I was going to say I would think it impertinent of me to guess. Obviously it’s not entirely impertinent, because Hughes has now put this in the public domain.

But he has put a very particular thing, a set of poems, in the public domain. He has not put out interviews; he’s not put out any other statement. There is a great difference between art and life, and what you take from your life to make your art. So I could not guess about what happens in his head. Birthday Letters | PBS NewsHour Birthday Letters February 18, 1998 at 12:00 AM EST [Sorry, the video for this story has expired, but you can still read the transcript below. ] January 29, 1996: Remembering the life and work of former Poet Laureate and Noble Prize winner Joseph Brodsky. JIM LEHRER: Now, Birthday Letters, a new book by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes about his relationship with the American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco has more. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Sylvia Plath was 30 years old when she died.

Since then, her published stories, letters, journals, and especially her uncompromising poetry have galvanized many women who found in her words an echo of their own extreme feelings. She became a heroine of the woman’s movement of the 1970s and remains one of the best-selling women poets ever. Plath was a precocious young woman from Massachusetts who began publishing when she was 17, and won prizes for her poetry at Smith College. She met Hughes in 1956 while in England studying on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge. Some critics and biographers have laid the blame for Plath’s death, directly or indirectly, at Hughes’s door; and until now, he has said or published almost nothing in response. But in the new book he finally tells their story as he experienced it, addressing her as if she were still able to read or hear him. About their London wedding, he writes: In that echo-gaunt weekday chancel I see you Wrestling to contain your flames In your pink wool knitted dress and in your eye-pupils–great cut jewels Jostling their tear flames, truly like big jewels Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Judging from their writing, Hughes and Plath had a tempestuous relationship, but they also encouraged each other and published books of highly praised verse. Plath also wrote a slightly fictionalized autobiography, The Bell Jar, which described the shock treatments given for her depression and recounted her first suicide attempt in 1953. Her father had died when she was eight, and she struggled with fear and depression until her own death. She and Hughes had a daughter in 1960 and, in 1962, a son. Later that year, after much marital discord, Hughes left the family; and on February 11, 1963, Plath put milk and bread by her children’s beds, sealed off their room, and then stuck her head in a gas oven. The poems she wrote in the last months of her life, sometimes at the feverish rate of two or three a day, were published under the title, Ariel, in 1996, to great acclaim. In one, she writes: I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for her collected works, which Ted Hughes edited. He has published dozens of books, plays, children’s stories, and translations and has received many accolades. He has been Great Britain’s poet laureate since 1984. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Ted Hughes’s new book is a best seller and is already in its third printing. Here to tell us more are Robert Hass, poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997, and Diane Middlebrook, professor of English at Stanford University and author of a biography of the poet Anne Sexton. Thank you both for being with us. Diane Middlebrook, poetry books are not usually best-sellers. Why is this one so popular? DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: I think that the attraction of this particular book is unique in my experience anyway of poetry because it’s completing a story that got a lot of attention many years ago.

And perhaps these poems are meant to be a reflection in middle age on the intimacy they share that has become a sort of fairy tale. I think it’s a book that adds–I mean, people go to it–I’ve gone to it for information. And what I think I’ve found in it is an artist coming into contact with both his younger self, who was also an artist, and the art that his wife left behind her and is a legacy to him. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But Bob Hass, there wouldn’t be so much interest in it if there weren’t so much interest in Sylvia Plath, is that right? BOB HASS: Oh, yes. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And why is there so much interest in her? BOB HASS: Well, it’s because she’s a great and amazing poet. I was reading her journals over the weekend, and she said she wanted to write a book that amazed, that appalled the world. This was when she was 26, and at age 30, dead, she did just that.

Ariel, which is one of the remarkable books of American poetry in this half century, got published after her suicide, and the first shock of it was simply in the power of the writing–can people say these things–and the feeling of fatality, and within a year whatever phase of the feminist movement was happening in America was happening, and not just poets, but readers in general discovered this book of a young woman with two babies, whose husband had left her, living in a cold house, trying to be a mom, trying to be a writer, trying to put her life together, who didn’t make it–who killed herself–and wrote poems full of rage, bravery, and it electrified people. Ted Hughes in the book uses the metaphor of–he talks about her–paparazzo eye. You could say that he’s been under investigation for the suicide of Sylvia Plath for 35 years. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But that’s why–another reason why there’s so much interest, because although he did write introductions and a few letters about it, he hasn’t really spoken out publicly.

DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: Well, he did edit the complete poems, and, in fact, I think that Hughes’s continual intervention in Plath’s career is very problematic, since he made many interventions. As the world knows, he burned one of the journals that were left behind because he felt that it would not be good for her children to see them. People have always seen that as an effort to cover up his own guilt, because Plath was very forthcoming in the journals. They were her record to herself of her and her life. And, in fact, for me one of the pleasures and surprises of this book is feeling that Ted Hughes has been reading what I have been reading, and I’ve felt that this book of letters, “Birthday Letters” is, in fact, a man who can now, having lived so long, can afford to recognize and, in fact, deal with it in an artistic mode, something that was probably too painful at the time that it was happening, or that he couldn’t even take in. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you think? What struck you about the poems, themselves, as a poet?

BOB HASS: What struck me actually was the whole business of the autobiographical mode; that is–I noticed in the lead-in that you said now we’re going to get the story as he experienced it. Of course, that can’t be true. You know, anybody in the audience who’s ever been through a divorce or grief over a loss, knows that with most intense experiences we hardly know what we’re feeling. We can reflect on it later and put it together. So I thought here–like everyone else–here is this story. This man has been silent about it for this long time. What was his side? And of course, what we’re getting is an older man’s attempt to reconstruct and get into dialogue with an extraordinary body of work, I mean, they were so young. He was– ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Read something that particularly struck you. BOB HASS: Here’s something that gives some of the hauntingness of this. It’s an early poem. In fact, it’s about his first meeting her at Cambridge in the spring of 1956 at a party.

“Ten years after your death, I meet in a page of your journal as never before the shock of your joy, then the shock of your prayers, and under those prayers your panic that prayers might not create a miracle, then under the panic, the nightmare that came rolling to crush you. Suddenly, I read all of this, your actual words as they floated out through your throat and tongue and onto your page, just as when your daughter, years ago now, drifting in, gazing up into my face, mystified where I worked alone in the silent house asked suddenly, ‘Daddy, where’s mummy?’ The freezing soil of the garden as I clawed it all around me–that midnight’s giant clock of frost and somewhere inside it, wanting to feel nothing, a pulse of fever–somewhere inside the numbness of the earth our future trying to happen. I look up, as if to meet your voice with all its urgent future that has burst in on me, then look back at the book, the printed words, you are 10 years dead. It is only a story, your story, my story.” So this must have been written- DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: In 1973.

BOB HASS: 1973. It’s possible that they’re Birthday Letters because he wrote each year on her birthday. DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: Oh, that’s true. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else strikes you about that? What are you hearing? BOB HASS: The problem for a writer with writing personal, autobiographical poetry about those parts of your life that involve other people–a mate, or a parent, a child–is how do you do it without making yourself look good? Ted Hughes has been accused of the death of his wife. I mean, there were poems for years, “you killed her.” There’s an–there are 50 books on this subject. It’s an industry of scholarship, and now we come to this voice, impossible not to justify yourself at some level. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So you’re hearing him justifying himself. BOB HASS: Oh, yes. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Are you? DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: Not exactly.

There’s a story that I believe Hughes tells in some notes in the collected poems about how when Plath was stuck for subjects, he would set her problems. He would say, why don’t you write a poem about this, and some of her best poems–I think “The Moon” and the “Yew Tree,” brilliant poem– Plath–that I believe is owing to an exercise of this kind. It was liberating to her to have a problem come–a formal problem sometimes, or topical problem come and be the problem. She has set his problem. Now she is in charge of the dialogue. She has just simply laid things out, and for years people have been writing not only poems but papers and books and explanations and diagnoses about this. And he enters it, I believe, with a very large generic problem here. He’s got to find a way to say something to her. And I believe this is a book written by a man in his prime who knows that this is a subject that he’s got to deal with and he’s dealing with it as a poet. I see it as a poem attempting to be–a set of poems attempting to be in dialogue with those problems.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: In the few seconds we have left, do these poems in the Ted Hughes book, which is a best-seller, stand on their own, or are they only of great interest because of the biographical material they have? DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: All poems should have that problem. This is a book for us, and who knows how long it can last, but right now it makes it possible not only to think about Plath and Hughes but I think to think about the marriage of two people who are immensely talented and at war. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you think? BOB HASS: I think that the art, not the gossip part of this, is that these two writers make people come to terms with the ways in which we can know it all and make an account of our experience. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Thank you both very much. DIANE MIDDLEBROOK: Thank you, Elizabeth. BOB HASS: Thank you, Elizabeth.

Sylvia Plath | poetryarchive.org Tweet Widget About Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. Born in Boston in the USA she was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her German father, Otto, died suddenly, a trauma which surfaces in her poetry repeatedly. Plath suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life, her first serious breakdown occurring in 1953 and later remembered in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963). This episode led to her first suicide attempt, but she recovered and graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts before winning a Fullbright Scholarship to Cambridge University. Here she met the English poet, Ted Hughes, their passionate courtship leading quickly to marriage in June 1956. After two years teaching in the United States the couple returned to the UK when Plath became pregnant, their daughter Frieda being born in April 1960. By this time Hughes was established as a significant new voice in British poetry, but now Plath's own first collection The Colossus was published and began to receive attention.

After the birth of their son in 1962 their marriage became increasingly fraught with Plath's mental instability and Hughes' infidelity both likely contributing factors. The couple separated and Plath took the children to live with her in London. During an extraordinary burst of creativity in the autumn of 1962 Plath wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests. However, that winter was particularly severe and Plath became increasingly isolated and depressed: on February 11th 1963 she committed suicide by gassing herself in the kitchen of her flat. Debate has raged ever since over who was to blame for Plath's early death, the feminist movement adopting her as an icon and interpreting Hughes' role as her literary executor, particularly his destruction of her final journal, as continuing a patriarchal oppression she had experienced in life. More recently this interpretation has been challenged, not least by Hughes himself in his collection Birthday Letters, which give his view of their marriage in a series of tender and searing poems.

Plath's own work, with its intense sometimes shocking use of metaphor and her exploration of extreme states of mind, refuses to be overshadowed by her tragic biography: in 1982 she became the first poet to be posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. Her two Archive poems are fine examples of her arresting style and fearless examination of self and society. 'Parliament Hill Fields' was written after she had experienced a miscarriage in February 1961 and shows her ability to invest external landscape with the urgency of psychic disturbance. In her introduction to this poem, Plath's comments suggest that the poem's narrator is a third party, not herself. This is revealing: whilst considered a leading "confessional" poet, Plath often uses dramatic monologue, as in her famous poem 'The Applicant'. In this devastating satire on the conventional marriage, she uses the sales-speak of modern commerce to expose society's de-humanising expectations.

Both poems show Plath's skill in manipulating the sound of language: the rich alliteration and assonance of 'Parliament Hill Fields' creating a palpable sense of place, whilst the short lines of 'The Applicant' contribute to its aggressive tone, as encapsulated in her repeated use of the pronoun "it". Plath's reading style is cool and controlled but this only emphasises the driven energy of these extraordinary testaments, sent from the edge of experience. Additional material and useful links BBC Poetry Season - Plath 'Birthday Letters': A Portrait of Plath in Poetry for Its Own Sake 'Birthday Letters': A Portrait of Plath in Poetry for Its Own Sake Related Articles By Ted Hughes 198 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20. o literary couple has been so mythologized as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her own fierce, slashing poems, Plath dramatized herself as a terror-stricken victim, a doomed Electra, a "Lady Lazarus," eating "men like air," and she depicted her husband alternately as her "savior," as her "muse and god-creator" and as her "jailer" and betrayer.

In the years since her death -- in 1963, she stuck her head inside her kitchen oven and turned on the gas -- feminist critics have canonized Plath as a martyr while reviling Hughes as a villain: the callous husband, who left her for another woman, the ogre who drove her to suicide and took over her literary estate in an effort to shape her memory. Throughout all this, Hughes has remained silent, turning aside inquiries from biographers and reporters while editing posthumous collections of Plath's various writings. With "Birthday Letters," his astonishing new volume of poems, he finally shatters that silence, giving us an extraordinarily intimate portrait of their relationship, from their first meeting in 1956 through their marriage and her suicide. Written over the last few decades, the poems seem remarkably free of self-pity, score-settling and spin; rather, they draw a deeply affecting portrait of the couple's marriage while attesting to Hughes' own impassioned love for Plath. Poems, however, are not biography, and these should not be read simply for the light they shed on the Hughes-Plath relationship. They should be read because they constitute the strongest, most emotionally tactile work of Hughes' career.

Urgent, tensile and harrowing, these poems recapitulate all the major themes that have animated Hughes' earlier work -- violence, death and survival, a Darwinian view of nature, a Hobbesian view of the world -- while revealing just how rooted this appetite, in Helen Vendler's words, "for naming and ornamenting disaster" was in his own experience of life. At the same time, the poems in "Birthday Letters" evince a new directness and vulnerability. Burned free of the detachment, condescension and contrivance that cramped much of his earlier work, they dazzle not only with verbal dexterity but also with clear- hearted emotion. They are clearly the work of a poet writing out of the deepest core of his being. Almost every poem in the volume is written as a letter addressed directly to Plath, and many allude to Plath's own favorite images (the sun, the moon, the sea) and her vocabulary as a poet.

In fact, one of the things that is so fascinating about "Birthday Letters" is how persuasively Hughes grapples with the memory of his former wife, both with his own remembrances of their experiences together (their wedding, their honeymoon, a trip to the United States, the birth of their two children) and with the mythologized versions of those experiences as they have come down to us in Plath's own poems, journals and letters. Hughes gives us his own version of the first kiss famously mythologized by Plath ("he kissed me bang smash on the mouth . . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek").

He remembers her eyes, "a crush of diamonds, incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears," and her tooth marks that were "to brand my face for the next month./The me beneath it for good." He conjures her up on their wedding day, "so slender and new and naked,/A nodding spray of wet lilac." And he describes her "exaggerated American/Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners." As Plath's own writings attest, there were at least two faces she showed to the world: the sunlit American girl, a straight-A student, the picture of friskiness and vitality and ambition; and the shadow side, the haunted woman, trapped in a bell jar, plagued by nighttime terrors and quickening rages, and drawn ineluctably, like Persephone, toward an underworld of despair and death. Hughes gives us both Plaths: the magical, kinetic girl he fell in love with and the sad, frightened woman he felt he could no longer reach. Hughes, for his part, plays Ferdinand to her Miranda, and later Leonard to her Virginia.

He feels unworthy marrying her, "the Swineherd/ Stealing this daughter's pedigreed dreams/From under her watchtowered searchlit future," but embraces their marriage as a fated match dangling the promise of Edenic bliss. There are quick, bright snapshots of their very ordinary happiness -- playing at being tourists in Paris, setting up house together, picking daffodils in the garden -- but there are hints, too, of strain and stress. The pressure of living with another poet -- all that observing and annotating, all that extrapolating of the ordinary into metaphor -- begins to take a toll. We see in these poems, as we saw in Plath's most famous "Ariel" poems, Plath's growing obsession with her father, Otto, who died when she was 8, and we are also made to feel Hughes' own growing sense of helplessness, his inability to save or soothe his wife.

In "The Table," he writes, "I wanted to make you a solid writing-table/That would last a lifetime" but found instead that he had "made and fitted a door/Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave." In poem after poem, Otto is depicted as the Minotaur, a rough, dark beast waiting to snatch Plath away from happiness and youth, while Plath, in turn, is seen as a maiden, intent on entering his labyrinth and meeting her self-appointed fate. There are verses in this volume where Hughes' penchant for parables and animal metaphors can feel forced: especially strained is one poem that tries to find an omen of the author's marriage in his encounter with a wounded bat. These, however, are the exceptions. Most of the poems in "Birthday Letters" have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Hughes' writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief.

"But then I sat, stilled," he writes, "Unable to fathom what stilled you/As I looked at you, as I am stilled/Permanently now, permanently/Bending so briefly at your open coffin." Ted Hughes's last letter: Unearthed, poet's lament on Sylvia Plath's suicide | Daily Mail Online Ted Hughes's last letter: Unearthed, poet's lament on Sylvia Plath's suicide Anguish: Poet Ted Hughes wrote a poem about his torment over wife Sylvia Plath's suicide It was the tragic end to a romance between two writers who captivated the public. Now a newly discovered poem by Ted Hughes has cast fresh light on his torment over the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath. The harrowing work has been unearthed at the British Library 47 years after Plath gassed herself at the age of 30. Hughes, a former poet laureate, became a hate figure for feminists after his ­philandering drove Plath to kill herself in February 1963. But his previously unpublished work, Last Letter, offers a fresh take on the tragic incident.

The poem was discovered by Melvyn Bragg in the British Library’s Ted Hughes archive with the help of his second wife, Carol Hughes. The full poem is published in the New Statesman, which is out today, and a line by line extract can be seen below. It describes the days leading up to Plath’s suicide, when the pair were living apart, and the night itself. He wrote: ‘What happened that night, your final night? Double, treble exposure over everything. ‘Late afternoon Friday, my last sight of you alive, burning your letter to me in the ashtray with that strange smile. ‘What did you say over the smoking shards of that letter so carefully annihilated, so calmly, that let me release you and leave you to blow its ashes off your plan.’ Family: Sylvia Plath with the couple's children Nicholas and Frieda In the final paragraph, the poet recalls the moment when he was told of his estranged wife’s death, writing: ‘And I had started to write when the telephone jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm, remembering everything. ‘It recovered in my hand. Then a voice like a selected weapon.

Or a measured injection, coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear: “Your wife is dead.” ’ Hughes remained silent about Plath’s suicide until he was terminally ill with cancer in 1998. He published Birthday Letters, a ­collection of 88 poems examining their life together and reaction to her death, but he left out the poem about her final night. Extract: The haunting words, uncovered by Melvyn Bragg Last night, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy told Channel 4 News that the newly published work was ‘almost unbearable to read’. She said: ‘It’s a poem that will speak in the way that a Shake­spearean tragedy does to people who’ve had the misfortune to touch on those issues. It shows how a suicide can scar the lives of those who still have to live after that death. ‘It seems to me to be the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath. There is a kind of deafening agony, blinding agony to this new poem.

It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written.’ Plath, the American author of The Bell Jar, killed herself after Hughes left her and their children Frieda and Nicholas for another woman, Assia Wevill. Nicholas – who last year hanged himself, aged 47 – had been just one and his sister two when their mother killed herself on February 11, 1963, at their home in Camden, North London. Hughes went on to settle down with Wevill, until she too commited suicide in 1969. A year later he ­married Carol. The poet was born in Yorkshire in 1930 and was poet laureate from 1984 until his death. Ranked as one of the best of his generation, his work is a set text at GCSE. To see drafts of the poem, go to Ted Hughes's 'Last Letter' | by Mark Ford | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books Warren J. Plath/Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on their honeymoon, Paris, 1956 “What happened that night?

Your final night.” So begins “Last Letter,” a poem, or rather draft of a poem, by Ted Hughes published in the October 11 issue of the British magazine the New Statesman. “Last Letter” was clearly intended to take its place in Hughes’s 1998 collection of poems to Plath, Birthday Letters , but it’s also clear that he never managed to finish it before he died on October 28, 1998. I suppose anything a poet as famous as Hughes didn’t get around to destroying before he died is likely to end up in the public domain eventually, and certainly a poem that at last sets out what he was up to on that fatal, freezing weekend of February 9 and 10 of 1963 was not going to languish in the British Library’s archive forever. The decision to publish the poem was taken by Melvyn Bragg, guest editor for that issue of the New Statesman, and a long-time friend of the poet, and Hughes’s widow Carol.

The poem was instantly praised by the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who on Channel 4 News compared its power to that of Shakespearean tragedy, and declared: It seems to me to be the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath. There is a kind of deafening agony, blinding agony to this new poem. It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written. There’s undoubtedly plenty of agony in the poem, but its power to move is closer to that of an uncontrolled diary entry than of a speech by King Lear or Macbeth. “Last Letter” is unlikely to do much to rehabilitate Hughes with those who hold him responsible for the death of the great young star of American poetry—and for the suicide of Assia Wevill, his companion after Plath’s death, some six years later.

(Like Plath, Assia gassed herself, and killed her four-year old daughter by Hughes, Shura, as well.) It was his affair with Assia, begun in the summer of 1962, that precipitated his separation from Plath, and a decisive moment in Birthday Letters, his narrative of the events leading up to Plath’s suicide, comes in the poem “The Inscription,” which recounts an occasion when husband and wife nearly got back together; in the course of this almost-reconciliation, however, Plath’s eyes happen to fall on Hughes’s edition of Shakespeare, a volume that in a fit of fury she had earlier ripped to pieces. The book has been miraculously “resurrected”: Wondering, with unbelieving fingers, She opened it. She read the inscription. She closed it Like the running animal that receives The fatal bullet without a faltering check In its stride. The resurrector of the book who inscribed it was of course Assia. Well, Assia Wevill, or so “Last Letter” tells us, was not the woman in whose arms Hughes spent the weekend his wife committed suicide; he was in fact with one Susan Alliston.

Alliston, like Plath, was a poet who would die young—not by her own hand, but of Hodgkin’s disease, in 1969. (By a curious coincidence an edition of her Poems and Journals, 1960–1969 , with an introduction by Hughes, was published earlier this year by Richard Hollis Press—now there’s a book whose sales will have seen a sudden spike.) It’s odd that Alliston had previously not figured in accounts of the Hughes/Plath split, or ones I’ve come across (she’s not mentioned, for instance, in Elaine Feinstein’s gossipy unauthorized biography of 2001, which is frank about many of his other affairs), because Hughes actually acknowledges his dalliance with Alliston in the poem “18 Rugby Street” collected in Birthday Letters. 18 Rugby Street, in Bloomsbury, was where he and Plath got together for the first time.

Susan Alliston lived in the same building, and the poem informs us that she would later be “caught in the labyrinth,” “would be holding me from my telephone/Those nights you would need me most.” This is how he presents their weekend together in “Last Letter”: That night Played by the Minotaur of that maze…. Susan and I spent that night In our wedding bed. I had not seen it Since we lay there on our wedding day. I did not take her back to my own bed. It had occurred to me, your -weekend over, You might appear—a surprise visitation. Did you appear, to tap at my dark window? So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you, In our own wedding bed—the same from which Within three years she would be taken to die In that same hospital where, within twelve hours, I would find you dead. It’s not easy to work out quite what he means by “dellarobbia”—presumably a reference to a work by either Luca or Andrea della Robbia, Renaissance Florentine sculptors.

He’s probably implying that she was a figure of sweetness and calm in comparison to Sylvia and Assia, whom the poem likens to “two mad needles” embroidering “their bloody tattoo/Somewhere behind my navel…criss-crossing their stitches,/Selecting among my nerves/For their colours.” But the rest is pretty clear—though in fact not quite true, or so an old Cambridge friend of Hughes’s called Daniel Huws, has suggested. (Huws’s Memories of Ted Hughes, 1952–1963 has also just been published, by the same press as Alliston’s journals and poems.) On October 17, a week after the publication of “Last Letter,” Huws gave a talk at Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire and noted various inaccuracies in the poem, including the fact that Susan Alliston’s flat was the one above that in which Hughes and Plath began their lives together, and which in fact they had rented from Daniel Huws’s father. So it probably wasn’t really their “wedding bed” in which he slept with Susan Alliston while Plath opened the gas taps—perhaps not much of an extenuating factor, but a very slight relief.

In a post on the Sylvia Plath Info website the Plath scholar Gail Crowther records Huws’s suggestion that “Last Letter” was written “towards the end of Hughes’ life and thus any inaccuracies [are] perhaps due to the passing of time, or maybe even poetic liberties.” It’s worth noting that if the poem does indeed take “liberties” with the truth, these liberties seem designed to intensify, rather than alleviate, Hughes’s coruscating sense of his own guilt. Al Alvarez, who spent much time with Plath in the terrible months of late 1962 and early 1963, has mounted the fiercest denunciation of “Last Letter.” In a piece in The Guardian of October 11 he called it “more a document than a poem” and pronounced it “uncooked.” What we get, Alvarez suggests, is “a confession: he is a guy in the witness box pleading guilty. It’s very strong stuff, but it ain’t finished.” Four days later, however, Alvarez decided he hadn’t been harsh enough on Hughes in his original piece.

The problem with “Last Letter,” he now asserted, was less one of “bad poetry” and more one of “bad conscience”: He was indeed a man in the dock, but the crimes he was pleading guilty to were treachery, double-dealing and shabby behaviour, and there was nothing noble or tragic about them. He had abandoned Sylvia and gone off with Assia Wevill; now he was betraying Assia for a fling with Susan Alliston. The poem implies it was not his fault: his “numbed love life,” he writes, was being fought over by two crazy tattooists, each trying to mark him as her own; what could he do? What indeed? In the end, making good poetry out of the mess he had created was beyond him. But what did that matter compared to the mess his behaviour had created for Sylvia? The real, heartbreaking poetry is in the long passage about her coming and going through the frozen streets to the public phone, calling again and again and never getting an answer. Alvarez, then, finds little that brings to mind Shakespearean tragedy in the poem.

But then Shakespeare’s characters were made up: to set out to create a successful work of art from the events Hughes describes would surely be an instance of even worse “conscience”; the poem’s jagged lines, its lurid, expressionist repetitions, its horrifying immediacy, suggest Hughes wrote “Last Letter” because he needed to, rather than because he thought he could make a good poem out of this impossible material. Of course we don’t know , and surely never will, if Plath really made numerous trips to the phone booth down the road to call Hughes the night she killed herself, as the penultimate verse of “Last Letter” imagines.

Nor if she really sent him a suicide note in the post on the morning of Friday, February 8 (three days after writing her final poem, “Edge”); “Last Letter” tells us he received it that very afternoon, rushed round at once, and “wept with relief when [she] opened the door.” In the course of their talk, the poem reveals, she burnt the letter in an ashtray, which he took as a sign for him to release her and “escape.” But there was to be no escape, as he found out on Monday morning on his return from 18 Rugby Street to his own flat; there he got out his papers and started to write, when the phone “jerked awake”: Then a voice like a selected weapon Or a measured injection, Coolly delivered its four words Deep into my ear: “Your wife is dead.” October 28, 2010, 11:15 am A cheat sheet for the news.

March 8 1998 3:30 AM Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes By Franklin Foer In 1963, the 30-year-old poet Sylvia Plath killed herself, placing her head on a folded cloth inside an oven and turning on the gas. Posthumously, Plath became a feminist icon. A slew of memoirs and biographies argued that the arrogance of her macho husband Ted Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate, precipitated her suicide. For 35 years, Hughes maintained a calculated silence about Plath's death. Last month, he finally published his side of their story in Birthday Letters--an autobiographical collection of 88 poems, written over 25 years. Hughes' friends predicted the book would exculpate him and silence his critics. But the debate remains as shrill as ever. What is the case against Hughes? How have Hughes' opponents and proponents exploited Birthday Letters? Advertisement First, the background: After an acclaimed start as a poet and while an undergraduate at Smith College, Plath attempted suicide. At age 20, she took 48 sleeping pills during a stint guest-editing Mademoiselle.

She was hospitalized, recovered, and went on a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge. There, in 1956, she met Ted Hughes, also a "promising" poet. Four months after their first encounter, in which Plath bit a chunk out of Hughes' cheek, they married. Each pursued careers as poets, and she bore two children. In October 1962, Hughes moved out of their house to pursue an affair with Assia Gutmann Wevill, a family friend. Four months later, Plath killed herself. Here are the major points of contention: 1 Did he kill her? Only college students and the most radical of feminists explicitly accuse Hughes of murder. But a set of memoirs by Plath's friends appeared in the early '70s arguing that Hughes' infidelity and cruelty drove Plath to suicide. This has become the standard. From the start of their marriage, Hughes mistreated her. He left her at home to care for the children and type his work while he schmoozed at London literary parties. Because Plath was especially sensitive--the quality they say made her poetry great--Hughes' gallivanting belittled and destroyed her.

Another version of this argument accuses him of a crime of omission: While Plath suffered from mental sickness and cried out for help, Hughes cruelly left her to fend for herself. Aside from anecdotal accounts of abuse, these arguments rely on testimony from Plath herself--in her journals and poems. She calls Hughes her "jailer" and compares him to a Nazi: "Man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw." Hughes also has a bad track record: In 1969 Wevill killed herself and her 2-year-old daughter, by sticking their heads in a gas oven. Advertisement Despite Birthday Letters' seeming tenderness toward Plath, feminists argue that the poems unwittingly show Hughes' true stripes. Some, such as Princeton Professor Elaine Showalter, say that Hughes tries to exonerate himself by arguing that Plath was fated to kill herself.

And he denies his power to save her: "I was a fly outside on the window pane/ Of my own domestic drama." Others, such as Plath's psychoanalytic biographer Jacqueline Rose, argue that Hughes continues to write condescendingly about Plath by figuring himself her "nurse and protector." Hughes, they say, doesn't understand his wife's resentments. 2 Was she nuts? Hughes' defenders, especially his fellow British poets and friends, such as James Fenton and Blake Morrison, contend that Plath's craziness caused her death. They cite her unsuccessful suicide attempt and chalk her problems up to obsession with her dead father--this is also Birthday Letters' position. "Though your father/ Was your God and there was no other ..." (The day her father died, Plath made her mother sign a contract vowing never to remarry.) Hughes, the argument goes, deserves credit for sticking with Plath for as long as he did. And Birthday Letters, they argue, once and for all proves "beyond all doubt that he loved Plath with all his heart" (Stephen Glover, the London Daily Telegraph). 3 Did he cover up? Feminists say Hughes' tormenting of Plath continued after her death.

They accuse Hughes of abusing his authority as Plath's literary executor to obfuscate his misdeeds. Hughes admits to destroying the journals Plath wrote during the last, most tumultuous year of their marriage and "misplacing" other journals. He also edited her poetry to exclude sections that supposedly document his abuse. Meanwhile, Hughes' sister Olwyn, the literary agent for Plath's estate, refused to cooperate with biographers critical of her brother--that means all biographers except one, Anne Stevenson (Bitter Fame)--forbidding them to quote at length from Plath's works. (Damning story: Hughes only authorized the publication of TheBell Jar in 1971--it had been published pseudonymously before--to fund his purchase of a country home.) Hughes responds that he didn't want the publication of materials that would prejudice his children's impression of their mother. 4 Were they both to blame? Birthday Letters has produced a revisionist school of Hughes defenders--ex-Plath hagiographers who now feel they were too hard on Hughes.

On the New York Times op-ed page, Diane Wood Middlebrook, biographer of Plath's friend Anne Sexton, applauds Hughes for accepting at least partial responsibility for Plath's death--"the role of Fatal Husband." In The New Yorker, A. Alvarez, the British poet whose 1972 memoir, The Savage God, provides the basis for most of the anti-Hughes attacks, praises Hughes' honesty. The revisionist line comes in two parts: 1) As in most bad marriages, both parties were at fault. 2) It was Plath's demons--her illness and irrational anger--that made her poems powerful. 5 Who is the better poet? Because several poems in Birthday Letters are explicit rewrites of Plath's poems, critics have decided to take up this question. Some of Plath's feminist defenders say Hughes' "lax and digressive" verses "serve mostly to remind us of what a great poet she was" (Katha Pollitt, the New York Times Book Review). Hughes' defenders use the occasion to restate their case against Plath's greatness: Her poetry was humorless and hyperbolic and would not be remembered had she not committed suicide.

Any good poems she did write were derivative of Hughes' style. Critics also divide along national lines. American critics, with such exceptions as Slate's Christopher Benfey, say that Hughes' poems are not very perceptive and not at all introspective. They especially take him to task for blaming Plath's suicide on fate and astrology. Britons, however, trumpet their poet laureate as worthy of the ranks of "Blake, Keats, Hardy and Auden" (the Times of London). They like that Birthday Letters combines Hughes' trademark violence--dying animals, stormy moors--with his compassion for Plath and introspection. Others take more pot shots at Plath defenders. James Fenton in the New York Review of Books says, " 'Plath lovers' will never forgive Hughes for having been Plath's lover--a role which in their fantasies they would much better fill."

Question: Which poet wrote the collection ‘Birthday Letters’?
Answer: Ted Hughes